Odd John: A Story Between Jest and Earnest

JOHN AND THE AUTHOR

WHEN I told John that I intended to write his biography, he laughed.
"My dear _man!_" he said, "But of course it was inevitable." The word
"man" on John's lips was often equivalent to "fool."

"Well," I protested, "a cat may look at a king."

He replied, "Yes, but can it really _see_ the king? Can you, puss,
really see me?"

This from a queer child to a full-grown man.

John was right. Though I had known him since he was a baby, and was in
a sense intimate with him, I knew almost nothing of the inner, the
real John. To this day I know little but the amazing facts of his
career. I know that he never walked till he was six, that before he
was ten he committed several burglaries and killed a policeman, that
at eighteen, when he still looked a young boy, he founded his
preposterous colony in the South Seas, and that at twenty-three, in
appearance but little altered, he outwitted the six warships that six
Great Powers had sent to seize him. I know also how John and all his
followers died.

Such facts I know; and even at the risk of destruction by one or other
of the six Great Powers, I shall tell the world all that I can
remember.

Something else I know, which will be very difficult to explain. In a
confused way I know why he founded his colony. I know too that
although he gave his whole energy to this task, he never seriously
expected to succeed. He was convinced that sooner or later the world
would find him out and destroy his work. "Our chance," he once said,
"is not as much as one in a million." And then he laughed.

John's laugh was strangely disturbing. It was a low, rapid, crisp
chuckle. It reminded me of that whispered crackling prelude which
sometimes precedes a really great crash of thunder. But no thunder
followed it, only a moment's silence; and for his hearers an odd
tingling of the scalp.

I believe that this inhuman, this ruthless but never malicious laugh
of John's contained the key to all that baffles me in his character.
Again and again I asked myself _why_ he laughed just then, what
precisely was he laughing _at_, what did his laughter really mean, was
that strange noise really laughter at all, or some emotional reaction
incomprehensible to my kind? Why, for instance, did the infant John
laugh through his tears when he had upset a kettle and was badly
scalded? I was not present at his death, but I feel sure that, when
his end came, his last breath spent itself in zestful laughter. Why?

In failing to answer these questions, I fail to understand the
essential John. His laughter, I am convinced, sprang from some aspect
of his experience entirely beyond my vision. I am therefore, of
course, as John affirmed, a very incompetent biographer. But if I keep
silence, the facts of his unique career will be lost for ever. In
spite of my incompetence, I must record all that I can, in the hope
that, if these pages fall into the hands of some being of John's own
stature, he may imaginatively see through them to the strange but
glorious spirit of John himself.